Tuesday, April 03, 2007

2007 Kirkwood Road Race Report

By Jason Thomas

Riders: Carney, Johan, Nate, Ryan and Jason

We started out with the plan of saving Nate and Johan for the last lap as both had raced already. Ryan and Jason went on the record as being unsure of form being the first race of the year and Carney just smiled and said the field will split up. The race was 6 laps (42 miles) over a rolling seven mile course with light wind. The first few laps were peppered with a few solo attacks but everything came back pretty quickly. It didn’t appear that any one team was specifically chasing. Around mid-race, Carney attacked. I later found that he wanted to get his “training intensity” in. Funny, I was getting more then my share of early season “intensity” just sitting on wheels… Carney stayed away for a little over a lap and it took some pretty good chasing to bring him back. With a lap and a half to go and Ryan monitoring the front, the rest of us planned to attack-counter-attack-counter, etc. on the back section of the last lap. With about 5 miles to go, Carney brought Nate to the front and off he went. Nate proved that saving him for the last lap was a good idea because he got a pretty good gap right away. It took a lot of hard chasing to finally bring him back right before the final sprint. Given that I (Jason) got popped with about 2k to go, I can’t comment on the dynamics of the sprint.

It appears that we will have a strong team this year. Three solo breaks got away from the field in the race – two of them were our guys (Nate and Carney). The blocking consisted of slowing the field down through the corners and riding in the front of the field and intentionally letting gaps open in attempt to send additional riders to the breaks. I think we rode well as a team and it was pretty easy to communicate with everyone. After seeing Carney and Nate off the front solo, I think that in the future, we should only send two or more guys up the road at a time – meaning that we should give each other a heads up or at least ride near each other in the field. The end result may have been a lot different if either of you had help from any strong motors. I’m not sure that we have a team that can consistently place in the sprints, but I think that we can do some real damage by sending multiple riders up the road at the same time.

I will go on record saying that I’m looking forward to more racing with all of you. I think that we can get some good results based on how everyone rode on Saturday.